“There’s a lot of nervous chat in the county about what you’re going to do,” said Carson.
“How do you mean?”
“Whether you’ll rebuild, or. You know. Shut it down.”
The bluntness of the question, given his state of fatigue and muddle, struck Gabe dumb for a moment.
“The inn means a lot to Bergen,” said Carson. “Town’s biggest employer.” As if Gabe didn’t know that.
Sandra arrived with a knife and fork for Gabe, and a glass of water.
“There’s a lot of bad feeling toward Cherry Weaver, I’ll tell you that,” said Shep. “A lot of people saying she as good as killed this town, if the inn goes.”
Gabe’s food arrived. He looked at it and suddenly saw it as a big mound of grease with a calorie count in the four figures, and thought of Sarah. Shep reached over and took a shrimp from Gabe’s plate with his fingers and ate it. Okay, fuck it. If I end up as big as Shep, I’ll join the police force and scare people for a living, Gabe thought.
“Poor Cherry,” he said, chewing. He shook salt onto his mound of shrimp, and added ketchup.
Carson Bailey gave a bark of laughter. “Poor Cherry!” He shook his head. “Poor Cherry is going to have a good long stay at the taxpayers’ resort in Windham. ‘Poor Cherry.’ After what she did to you?”
Gabe swallowed. “You guys are that sure she did it? Antippas smoked in his room all the time, you know. Housekeeping was in a swivet about it. The curtains, the bed clothes, all stank of smoke. I didn’t know how I was ever going to rent it out again, unless I redid the whole room.”
“Won’t have to worry about that now, anyway,” said Carson.
No, thought Gabe glumly, and his rage at Alexander Antippas drained away. Again.
“Her own lawyer thinks she’s guilty, you know,” said Shep. “Little Miss Weaver.”
Gabe stopped chewing and looked at him.
“Really?”
Carson’s and Shep’s eyes met. They were feeling extremely pleased with themselves.
“Her lawyer told you that Cherry did it? Is that even legal?”
“She’s pretty green. The lawyer. Might be her first criminal case.”
“But how could she do a thing like that?”
Shep and Carson began to chuckle, Shep’s noise a deepish huh, huh, huh, and Carson’s more of a giggle.
“I guess you get what you pay for,” said Carson.
Shep said, “She was having a cigarette in front of the jail, and a corrections officer we know was standing right there, smoking a cigarette. He asked her how the case was going and she said, it wasn’t the case she’d hoped for. Said Cherry didn’t want to take a lie detector test, and in Crim Law they teach you it’s not a good sign.”
“Oh,” said Gabe. “Well that’s not exactly a confession.”
“No, but if her own lawyer thinks she did it, it tells us a lot.”
The assistant AG for the great state of Maine caught Sandra’s eye and pointed to his coffee cup and his pie plate. He was reupping on both.
The Antippas house was in the hills, near enough to the Hotel Bel-Air that the family could order food as if they were calling room service and send one of the kids to pick it up. It wasn’t the house they’d lived in when Jenny was small and the babies were born; that had been a more modest affair in Studio City. The new house was a gift from Jenny. She’d commissioned it when her first album went triple platinum. The architect was a famous devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his creation was dug into the hillside, with bedrooms cantilevered out over the drop below, and an infinity pool that seemed to float above the cityscape, so when you were in it, especially at night, it was like swimming in sky.
What had been called a living room when Lisa was growing up in Ontario was called by the architect the “great room,” as if it were winter quarters for medieval Norsemen with the family and servants and animals all cooking and eating and sleeping around the same hearth to survive the winter. The great room had walls of glass, and when Lisa and Glory walked in at the end of their journey, it was so filled with flowers that they were walloped by the mass of colors and smells obscuring the fact that once a family had lived here. Some of the “floral tributes” had been in place since Tuesday and a swampy odor rose from the vases, but Lisa’s children had no idea about changing the water or removing dead stems. More arrangements covered the dining room table, most still wrapped in cellophane, with cards attached. “Condolences,” “Deepest Sympathy,” “Our thoughts are with you at this difficult time,” from Jenny’s agent, her manager, her record label, her stylist, the stars of the morning talk shows, her publicist, and the publicists of half the recording artists in Hollywood. The children had just left them wherever they found room, and waited for their parents to come home. Then a fresh wave had arrived when news of Alexander’s death hit the papers, from all the same people and some new ones. “At this difficult time.” Why did they even try?
Sophie and Ada were sitting in the great room, waiting. They burst into tears as they heard, at last, the sound of the dog’s scrabbling toes on the slate floor of the hall. As Colette rushed toward them they were rushing the other way, into the two women’s arms. They shook and sobbed there. Then they switched, and embraced and sobbed in the arms of the other. Jeremy was downstairs in the family gym. Someone sent for him, and he appeared, wearing shorts and a sweaty T-shirt with a picture of Artemis on it, a relic from her “Break Me” tour. His earphones were around his neck, and as he moved close to them, they could hear Jenny singing from the tiny iPod strapped to Jeremy’s arm. He too began to cry, as he hugged first his mother, then his aunt. Colette pranced among them, upset, overjoyed, annoyed, and confused, barking.
The housekeeper, Manuela, came out of the kitchen and she too was embraced, as she murmured in Spanish with tears in her eyes. She was a plump woman in a pale blue uniform with wire-rimmed glasses and her glossy black hair in a bun. She gestured at the jungle of flora in the great room, then led the way into the dining room.
“The children wanted you to see them,” said Manuela.
“I understand.”
“You want me to fix them?” She meant change the water, trim the stems, save what could be saved. Lisa reached for the card attached to an enormous bunch of white roses. “Our thoughts are with you in your sorrow.” From the law firm Alex used when someone sued him.
“No. Please. Please get rid of them. Keep the cards.”
Manuela’s husband, Freddy, came in from the car with the luggage, and carried it through to the bedrooms. Lisa followed him, limping. She had been longing to be at home for the last five days, but now that she was here she felt trapped. It was too much sensation, too much intensity, too much horror. The intrusion of all the curiosity and false sentiment was more of a burden than she’d expected, and added to it now was the grief of her children, all looking to her to make it better somehow, to help, to cope. They said God never sent you more than you could handle. Who were They, and what the hell did They know about it?
She walked into the bedroom she had shared with Alex for so many years. She’d just had it redone in the spring. The walls were covered in French hand-blocked paper, patterned in gold vines on a cream-colored background. The gold vines caught the evening sun and flared, as if they were burning without being consumed. The headboard of the enormous bed was covered with sand-colored shantung silk, matching the curtains and the carpet. There was an oily stain on the silk on Alex’s side of the bed where his head had rested when he watched the enormous TV embedded in the wall above built-in pear wood dressers.
She watched Freddy put the suitcases on the silk-upholstered bench at the end of the bed, Alex’s covered with Ls and Vs. Alex had liked logos that let the world know how much he had paid for everything. She could get rid of those now. No more Louis Vuitton luggage, no more scarves with linked Chanel Cs on them, that Alex gave her at every birthday. If she wanted to get rid of them. Did she? She couldn’t tell. She’d been Alex’s cre
ature for so long.
Alex’s suitcase. The police had brought his suitcase and the clothes, whatever they didn’t think was evidence, to the room she and Glory shared, and Glory had packed it for her. Glory had really tried, this week. The suitcase stank of smoke and wet, although things that had been in the closet had survived the hosing surprisingly well. The maid must have closed the closet doors. Alex never did.
And now. Should she unpack it? Why? Should she send his beautiful custom-made shirts to the laundry, so they could hang in the closet for no one to wear, ever again?
His clothes? His sock drawer? His desk, his computer? Did she really want to know what was in them?
What if it had been she who had died? What would be found in her drawers? The sex toys from Babeland in her bedside table? Maybe she should tape notes to them right now: these were presents and I never used them. And I never threw them out because I was planning to give them to the poor. What a good idea.
Maybe she should just throw the suitcase out without unpacking it. Or give it to Freddy. Maybe someone at his church weighed 350 pounds. You could put two of Freddy in one of Alex’s suits; maybe they could figure out a way for two people to wear the clothes at the same time.
When her son’s school sent the eighth-graders to Ecuador to see the cloud forests and the Galápagos, they always had a clothing drive so they could take suitcases full of castoffs to donate when they got there. All over Quito you could see children playing in the street wearing blazers with school crests, and on their way to the mountains Jeremy had caught sight of a farmer plowing on his tractor, wearing a tuxedo. But what was the chance they could use clothes as big as this?
The funeral people, with their ritual pomp, made death seem so dignified. She realized that she should have told Manuela that she and Freddy could take the truck and carry all those flowers to their church, where armies of ladies would pull out all the living blooms and reassemble them for the altar, or to take to shut-ins.
She roused herself and hobbled back to the kitchen, but it was too late. Manuela had already obediently carried the masses of bouquets out the back door and left them in piles beside trash barrels. And up on the road, outside the gates, photographers with long lenses were taking pictures of them.
DAY EIGHT, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13
On Sunday morning Earl Niner found Gloria Poole’s suitcase. He put his pitchfork into the pile out behind the stables where he dumped the dirty straw and horse apples after he mucked out the stalls, and deep in the middle of it, he hit something solid. He dug it out and carried it, still smeared with dung and a few tendrils of rotting salad, to the basement door of the hotel and left it in the dank room where the gardening tools were kept. Then he went to tell Mr. Gurrell. Gabe called Shep Gordon at the barracks and was patched through to him at home. Shep was off-duty and just about to take his stepson to the shooting range. He told Gabe to call Buster, since he was right down the road.
Buster arrived with all speed, blue light silently revolving. He had forgone the siren. Gabe Gurrell met him at the front steps.
Gabe said, “I thought it was best to keep him in my office, on his own, before everyone in the back of the house has a chance to ask him things and tell him their theories.” Buster agreed that that had been a good plan, and followed Gabe upstairs.
Earl was sitting rigid in an overstuffed armchair covered in mint brocade, staring at his mucky boots and dirty fingernails, and fidgeting. Buster had planned to question him in Gabe’s office, but he felt a visceral sympathy when he saw how itchy Earl looked. He’d get nothing but monosyllables from him in here.
“Why don’t you show me where you found it,” he said. Earl got out of his chair more crisply than Buster would have thought possible and bolted for the door.
Earl led the way down a staircase that let them out on the side of the building. He scuttled along with more freedom of movement than he ever displayed in the public parts of the hotel. Buster knew the feeling. This was a man at home with solitude and animals and with judging the weather by smelling the wind, not with carpets and fancy upholstery. Buster wondered why he lived inside instead of out in the barns and sheds somewhere; surely there was a stableman’s apartment. But he realized he knew the answer. His animals needed constant temperatures, especially the parrot, and protection from drafts. Nineteenth-century workman’s quarters probably didn’t have the latest in creature comforts.
They trudged silently out past the kitchen garden, across the stable yard with its well-worn mounting block, and entered the big stone stable. The front entrance was an immense sliding door, big enough to admit a truck with a fully stacked hayrick. Earl had to hold the handle with both hands and hurl his weight sideways to get the door rolling.
Inside, in the fragrant dimness, Buster saw rows of box stalls, now mostly empty. There were brass plates on the doors with the names of long-dead occupants. FROLIC. BLUE RIDGE. SAFETY. Safety was a good name for a saddle horse. There were five animals left, two ponies, two sleepy old geldings, and a mare. The dim air was full of dust motes from the hay and straw stored in the lofts above, and smelled of the loamy sweat of the horses. They stood, heads down, drowsing through the morning, except for the mare, a pretty chestnut named Kitty, who stretched her neck over the top of her stall door, and watched them come through. Buster stopped to stroke her velvety nose and she nuzzled at his pockets to see if he had any treats for her. Earl had to stop and wait for the deputy to remember where they were supposed to be going.
They clattered across the bay where the horses would be cross-tied to be washed down and groomed after exercise. Earl had his brushes and curry combs and hoof picks all carefully cleaned and hung on a Peg-Board. The concrete floor slanted toward a central drain, and a bucket and sponges stood by the tap. Buster’s attention snagged here too; he loved special equipment, especially when it had to do with animals. He looked at the lunge lines coiled and hung on hooks. The halters, the leather supple and glossy. The lead lines, for beginning riders. Earl almost lost him again at the tack room, with its rows of English saddles on triangle-shaped brackets that projected from the dark wainscot wall, the stirrups neatly tucked up at the top of their leathers, and rows of bridles on hooks, with all kinds of bits. Snaffles, curbs, and one draconian one of a type Buster had never seen before. He would have liked to nip in and have a better look at it, but Earl was rolling back the door that led outside behind the barn. The broad slant of sunlight cutting a sudden path across the floor recalled him, and he followed Earl out into the weak autumn warmth.
There was a paddock out here, for letting the horses out in the fresh air. In the distance Buster saw a riding ring, well made, if in need of a coat of paint.
“Do you give riding lessons?” Buster asked.
“Not me,” said Earl. “Girl from Bergen Falls boards her horses here. She gives lessons and takes the guests on trail rides. This is where I found her.” He gestured at a wide square compost heap, held in place by a low wall of logs. “I turn the pile a couple or three times a week. Stuck my pitchfork in and hit something. Cleared a hole and there she was.”
By the end of this speech, Buster had understood that “she” referred to the suitcase, which was a relief. He took out his pad and pencil.
“What time was this?”
“Don’t wear a watch.”
“Do your best.”
Earl thought about it. “Must have been about nine-fifteen, nine-thirty. Mr. Rexroth was just going out on his way to church, and he has to drive a ways.” Earl gestured in the direction of the front driveway, where you could just see the inn’s big stone gateposts from where they stood.
“And this is the compost heap for the whole operation?”
“Yuh.”
“Garden waste, kitchen scraps, the whole nine yards?”
“Yuh. We dump it all right here.”
“I thought you had to have some kind of closed-up bin to get it to cook right.”
“You see the steam coming off it?” Earl
asked.
“I do.”
“She just cooks away no matter what we do to her. We got all the right things, going in. Even earthworms. When this pile gets up over the rails, we start a new one, and in a couple of weeks, this one is ready for the gardens.”
Buster scribbled. “So the kitchen dumps out here, and the garden crew?”
“Yuh. Housekeeping too. They all got their own wheelbarrows. Have to, otherwise, someone’s always complaining that someone else took their wheelbarrow and never brought it back.”
“Housekeeping? What do they put in?”
“Shredded paper. Ash from the fireplaces.”
Buster was losing the thread a little, thinking of the compost bin he had built for Brianna, with instructions from the Internet. They were doing something wrong; the stuff they put in there didn’t so much cook as it rotted. And not very fast at that. He wondered if fireplace ashes would help. Maybe Earl would come over and give him some advice. Unconsciously, as he did when he was trying to sort something out, he had started to pace. Earl sat down on a straw bale and watched him with interest. The silence stretched.
“I’ve been trying to work out when was the last time I turned it,” he offered helpfully.
Buster remembered what he was supposed to be doing.
“That would be important to know,” he said, turning to a new sheet in his notebook.
“I think it must have been Wednesday morning.”
“You haven’t turned it since the fire?”
“Been busy. That’s what makes me think Wednesday morning. Unless it was Tuesday.”
Buster made notes.
“And when you found the suitcase, what did you do?”
“I took it in to the tool room and went to find Mr. Gurrell.”
“You didn’t try to open it?”
“It’s not my suitcase.”
“You must have been curious.”
“Curious about a lot of things. Doesn’t make ’em my business.”
“And were you wearing gloves at the time?”